Portable Hard Drives - Tell us about yours!

[Cliff3]

If portable is meant to describe the drive and not what it's connected to, then I have a Lacie Porsche 80GB FW400/USB drive. It's great for taking along on road trips or use as a bootable clone backup of the internal laptop drive. It's a little small and a little slow these days, and I am eyeing one of the newer Lacie rugged drives with FW800.

If we're talking external storage, then I have two Maxtor 300GB 3Gbps SATA drives in USB/eSATA enclosures. They normally live attached to my AEBS as airdisks, but if I need a big fat data pipe then I connect them directly to my MBP via a Sonnet Technologies eSATA expresscard.

 

[jelloyacket]

Yeah, not too many expansion options on my PowerBook. Eventually I'll have to get a more powerful rig. Hopefully Apple comes out with a hot new 12" MBP in the next year or so, that way I don't have to buy an iMac.

 

[MikeTheC]

I've got a LaCie 160GB FireWire HDD, and a Manhattan 3.5" external USB2/eSata enclosure which I use to swap (infrequently) between two different 80GB SATA drives.

All have been very reliable, no issues and no complaints.

One comment, though: as generally technologically superior as FireWire is (relative to USB 1 and USB 2), the cable connector kind of sucks, as it can be annoyingly easy to pull out of the plug on a computer. However, that's a criticism of the IEEE 1394a port design, not the LaCie drive.

 

[blodwyn]

PS: update
I went and bought a 500gb mystudio WD with firewire/USb etc and guess what..the firewire worked on TIGER when i backed things up and when i upgraded to leopard the firewire didnt work.Im using 400 FW btw.
Im now on USB for timebeing.
Anyone expereince the firewire cables not working on the leopard OS with Western digital equipment?


PS: I spoke to customer support and the guy said to connect the adapter to a wall outlet as opposed to a surge protector when using firewire ports. Seems to give it more power. Which makes no sense since It was connected to surge protector when in tiger.
Mmmmm.....Ill have to try it when i get home.Anyone can confirm this .
thanks

I have a couple of MyBooks connected via Firewire to my G5 iMac, which I just upgraded to Leopard (clean install). I'm using the cables that came with the drives, and they're working fine. I'm not using a surge protector, although this seems a bit of a stretch to be causing the problem. Can you try them on another Mac?

 

[cpnotebook80]

I have a couple of MyBooks connected via Firewire to my G5 iMac, which I just upgraded to Leopard (clean install). I'm using the cables that came with the drives, and they're working fine. I'm not using a surge protector, although this seems a bit of a stretch to be causing the problem. Can you try them on another Mac?

Yes i just bought a new imac 20" and will check on that. I tried what the CSR rep told me and nah..it didnt work.Mind you i didnt do a clean install just an upgrade.PLus im not using a macbook but the old 20" imac c2d 2.16 model
However, I when the drive is connected via firewire I see in the "about this mac" option where firewire shows up that it shows something is connected but doesnt tell me a name just unknown. mmm